The story of Royal Navy diver Commander Lionel Crabb is one of the great British spy mysteries, and conspiracy theorists still buzz around it as excitedly as ever.
Paradoxically, the shadowy figure of Crabb has become one of the best-known names in British diving. Every so often another book comes out that advances – or complicates – the story further.
In a nutshell, Crabb, a wartime diving hero, undertook a mission to dive beneath the Russian naval cruiser Ordzhonikidze when it visited Portsmouth in 1956.
This was especially sensitive because the warship had just conveyed to Britain the Soviet Union’s most powerful men, Premier Krushchev and Marshal Bulganin.
Was Crabb trying to find out what made the warship so manoeuvrable? Unlikely, because that mission had already been accomplished.
The diver didn’t return. Was he killed by the Russians? The convenient discovery and burial of a headless body washed up some months later was dismissed by informed watchers as just part of an elaborate official cover-up.
It is widely believed that Crabb was taken aboard Ordzhonikidze and delivered to the USSR, but whether under duress to work for the Russians (his diving and underwater ordnance skills would have been valuable), or because he wanted to defect, or because he believed he was to act as a double agent, forms the core of this book.
Unusually, a 100-year black-out has been imposed on official documents relating to the Crabb affair.
Why the secrecy? Mike & Jacqui Welham are convinced that only a royal connection can explain this. The head of the Royal Navy at the time was Lord Mountbatten, and he may have given the frogman his orders directly.
Unlikely as it seems, both men had been involved in the bohemian London art scene in the post-war years, a community implicated in the trafficking of Nazi-looted treasures.
The spy Anthony Blunt was another member of the circle.
Mountbatten was a homosexual, and thus susceptible to blackmail at a time when the practice was illegal, allege the authors. It seems he also had Soviet sympathies – not, you might think, the best qualifications for a man in his position during the Cold War.
Did “M” reinvent Crabb’s fading diving career (the frogman seems to have been falling back on the disturbing rubber fetish that destroyed his marriage) by getting him to dive for the Reds? There is plenty of interesting evidence and conjecture here.
The Welhams originally wrote their book Frogman Spy 20 years ago, and The Crabb Enigma is an updated and expanded version. Unfortunately it gets off to a shaky start. There is a lot of breathless explanation of attempts by an “Agent X” to deflect the writers and others from their cause. This may be intriguing, but it delays the main story and would have been better inserted later in the book.
There has also been some sort of editing oversight in the first part of the book, leaving the impression that two people have been writing separately (as may be the case), one carefully and one less so, and that their work has not quite been joined up.
Persevere beyond this, however, and once the writing style settles this book is hard to put down.
After all these years, the Crabb story still has the capacity not only to intrigue but to shock.
Steve Weinman
Troubador
ISBN: 9781848763821
Softback, 284pp, £9.99
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